Lady Good-for-Nothing eBook

They talked merrily while Manasseh brought in the
breakfast dishes—­for Master Dicky bread-and-milk
followed by a simple steak of cod; a bewildering succession
of chowder, omelet, devilled kidneys, cold ham, game
pie, and fruit for the Collector, who professed himself
keen-set as a hunter, and washed down the viands with
a tankard of cider. He described his bathe, and
promised Dicky that he should have his first swimming
lessons next summer. “I must talk about
you to your Uncle Harry. Craze for the sea?
At your age if he saw a puddle of water he must stick
his toes in it. He’s cruising just now,
off South Carolina, keeping a look-out for guarda-costas.
He’ll render an account of them, you may be
sure. He writes that he may be coming up Boston
way any time now. Oh, I can swim, but for diving
you should see your Uncle Harry—­ off the
yard-arm—­body taut as a whip—­nothing
like it in any of the old Greeks’ statues.
Plenty of talk about bathing; but diving? No.
In the east, must go south to the Persian Gulf to
see diving. The god Hermes descending on Ogygia—­if
you could imagine that, you had Uncle Harry—­
the shoot outwards, the delicate curve to a straight
slant, heels rising above rigid body while you counted,
begad! holding your breath. Then the plumb drop,
like a gannet’s—­”

Dicky listened, glorious vistas opening before him.
With the fruit Manasseh brought coffee; and still
the boy sat entranced while his father chatted, glowing
with exercise and enjoying a breakfast at every point
excellent.

It was in merest thoughtlessness, no doubt, that having
arranged for Dicky’s morning walk, and after
smoking a tobacco leaf rolled with an art of which
Manasseh possessed the secret, the Collector so timed
his message to the stables that his groom brought
the horse Bayard around to the Inn door just as the
Sabbath bells began tolling for divine worship.
For as a sceptic he was careless rather than militant;
ridiculing religion only in his own set, and when
occasion arose, and then without fanaticism.
For such piety as his mother’s he had even a
tolerant respect; and in any event had too much breeding
to affront of set purpose the godly townsfolk of Port
Nassau. At the first note of the bells he frowned
and blamed himself for not having started earlier.
But he had already made appointment by letter to meet
the Surveyor and the Assistant Surveyor at noon on
the headland, to measure out and discuss the site
of the proposed fortification; and he was a punctilious
man in observing engagements.

It may be asked how, if civil to other men’s
scruples, he had come to make such an appointment
for the Sabbath. He had answered this and (as
he hoped) with suitable apologies in his letter to
the surveyor, Mr. Wapshott: explaining that as
His Majesty’s business was bringing him to Port
Nassau, so it obliged him to be back at Boston by such-and-such
a date. He was personally unacquainted with this
Mr. Wapshott, who had omitted the courtesy of calling
upon him at the Bowling Green, and whom by consequence
he was inclined to set down as a person of defective
manners. But Mr. Wapshott was, after all, in
the King’s service and would understand its
exigencies.